Dell’s Kevin Terwilliger recently presented the webinar “Update Your Legacy Systems with the IIoT.” Today he shares five best-practice steps when planning your next project
implementation:
Establish a project-success model
Choose an initial project that proposes a solution with a strong project-delivery methodology to enrich and complement business processes. A strong recipe for success is to understand how other projects have missed the mark. Build the underpinnings of the organization, the people and the process so that the technology can be delivered in a way that provides specific value. Consider these key project goals to ensure your success:
- Start with a well-defined problem to attack
- Get support by stakeholders who have the right expertise to get the problem solved
- Determine ownership within your IT and OT organizations
- Establish the ROI value and key project milestones
- Focus on projects that can transform both adoption of new technologies as well as improvement of business processes
Build on a strong foundation of data
Gain contextual visibility into operations
Establish real-time visibility into all that’s happening—where are your things, what alerts were triggered, how is the asset performing? Intelligent gateways can provide a contextual view across all assets and devices, as well as a map of locations, historical logs, reports, health and condition. All of this data enables users to tailor real-time visualizations to fit their specific needs and functional responsibilities. With granular and contextual data, manufacturers can apply network policies throughout the extended production process. Additionally, actionable data can be shared with the appropriate personnel, vendors and partners to inform and improve decision-making.
Apply rules and analytics to identify issues
Rules and analytics of all types can monitor the ongoing conditions of equipment, operations and even the surrounding environment. Known conditions, such as normal operating or expected usage patterns, can be reflected in rules that trigger when certain conditions are breached. However, there are challenges in terms of the volume and variety of the devices and data which traditional rules engines are not designed to handle. Choose a gateway that delivers a highly scalable, parallel-processing rules engine and an intuitive, visual rules editor that is simple to manage. For more complex situations, advanced predictive analytics can also help organization gain new insights from IoT data.
Automate actions when issues arise
IoT demands an increasing amount of automation—there are simply too many sensors and devices and too much data to process. Automating responses to abnormal conditions and issues is critical. Find an IoT solution with an action engine that can do basic tasks (such as send an SMS message when a rule is triggered) but also allows you to take actions through external systems. This combination provides a closed-loop response to issues in the operational environment, while providing traceability from the sensor data to the asset to the response all through a flexible automated process.
Kevin Terwilliger is solutions director for Dell’s IoT division.
